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Inside the Oculus Rift, Old Games Are New Again

The Oculus VR Inc. Rift headset is displayed for a photograph during the 'Step Into The Rift' event in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Thursday, June 11, 2015.

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Everything old can be new again, once you strap on the Oculus Rift.

After years of prototypes and promises, Oculus has finally unveiled the consumer version of its Rift virtual reality headset, which it plans to ship in the first quarter of 2016, at an event this morning in San Francisco. Thanks to a surprise partnership with Microsoft, the Rift (which still doesn't have a price tag) will come bundled with an Xbox One controller to give gamers something familiar to hold on to, and developers a stationary target to create games against. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey showed off Oculus Touch, a position-sensitive dual-handed controller for more intuitive VR input, that will ship separately from the Rift in the first half of 2016.

"This is the beginning of VR gaming," said Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe. "You're going to experience games as you've always dreamed of experiencing them."

For all that we've heard about how virtual reality will enable brand-new kinds of game genres and experiences, though, what Oculus had on display were established game developers showing experiences that most gamers have probably already spent hours of their lives on: Space dogfighting. A boy exploring a dungeon hoping to defeat an evil dragon. A collection of sports mini-games.

This doesn't mean VR is a gimmick. Quite to the contrary, it means that VR is so powerful that even the most well-worn game concepts can be made fresh again through the stunning sense of really being there.

I don't even mean a first-person view situation, either, like Oculus showed for Sanzaru Games' VR Sports Challenge. Sure, seeing a hockey puck fly at your goalie mask at a hundred miles an hour is probably going to be pretty neat. But as I've said before, one of the most fun VR experiences I've had has been not an in-your-face action thrill ride but Lucky's Tale, a slow-paced, non-threatening Super Mario style action game that you view in the third person.

It's difficult to describe why the sense of presence so changes how you perceive Lucky's Tale, which is also an Oculus launch title. To look at a standard video of it, you get the sense that 1998 is about to telephone and ask for the game to be returned immediately. But put on the headset and play it, and you're there—not inside Lucky's cranium, but hanging out. Towers loom over you. The tiny fox looks up at you and waves. Everything envelops you.

Still from Chronos trailer.

Gunfire Games

The fact that third-person actually works so well in VR seems to have caught on, as at least two of the other big games shown off at the Oculus presentation are third-person action-adventures: Chronos from Gunfire Games, and (probably the biggest surprise of the day) a new VR-exclusive game from Insomniac called Edge of Nowhere.

Again, look at these games in a flat video and you see experiences that you've seen many times before. But with sessions of Lucky's Tale under one's belt, imagining these experiences taking place within a VR environment is far more exciting than imagining playing them on a TV. They don't have to have blow-you-away bleeding-edge graphics to do that.

While it's understandable that Oculus wanted to make a big splash this morning by unveiling partnerships with well-known entities like Microsoft, Insomniac et al, indie developers weren't part of the show. To make sure we knew that independent VR development was still on Oculus' mind, head of developer strategy Anna Sweet (one of the recent high-profile defections to Facebook from Valve) noted that Oculus would invest $10 million into "accelerating the development" of indie games.

"We're looking forward to these same innovative developers discovering entirely new genres in VR," Sweet said.

Oculus VR

These new genres will probably lag behind the old ones, though. Ultimately, the inclusion of a standard Xbox One controller in the Oculus box is going to encourage standard gameplay designs. The introduction of the Oculus Touch controllers will certainly inspire new types of gameplay, but they're currently only being shown as prototypes, and won't launch (or be packed in with) the Rift itself.

The fact that Touch isn't in the box means that Oculus will run into a problem that all game consoles with optional accessories have to deal with: Game developers will have to choose between making products for the built-in controller, or the separate accessory. Oculus Touch owners will be a small subset of the already-small group of Oculus early adopters. It's not an impossible hurdle, but it is a hurdle.

But as Iribe kept reminding the audience during today's show, Rift isn't the end goal, it's the beginning. It may be beginning with old genres and a regular Xbox controller, but who knows where it'll end up?